


Other Streets and Other Towns

by biextroverts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 23:51:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14800307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biextroverts/pseuds/biextroverts
Summary: Emori leaves. Twenty-two years later, an invitation arrives.





	Other Streets and Other Towns

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Memori Appreciation Week 2018 Days 3 and 4: Breakup and Angst.
> 
> Title is from "Other Streets and Other Towns" by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which, along with Carpenter's "Hometown Girl," was my soundtrack while writing this fic. Listening is not required, but it is recommended, if only because the ambience of the songs is so damn good. 
> 
> Shoutout to my good friend @palbuddypoe for beta reading for me even though they're not a Memori stan like I am.

          She doesn’t know how whoever delivered the invitation found her address. She’s moved and changed her name since she last saw the man whose name is inscribed in simple serif typeface on the plain black background of  the card, has started, and lived now over twenty years of, a new life (one only marginally better than the one she’d had with him, the one she’d given up, along with all other evidence of her wild days, when she’d been given the opportunity to start fresh, and less satisfying, certainly, than kisses imbued with stolen whiskey and stupid songs played on a guitar for only her, but she tries not to dwell on those honey-sweet elements of the past; the picture of the whole, she tells herself, is tinged with too much bitterness for any semblance of regret). She was careful not to leave any sort of paper trail that could tie her to the unruly creature she’d been then, still only pays for things in cash and makes her only use of the world wide web from the cantankerous old desktops at the library in town. She should be impossible to trace.

          Maybe it’s fate.

          No matter the answer, the nineteen-hour bus ride from Carthage to Kearny gives her plenty of time to turn the question over in her mind. She takes a window seat at the back of the bus when she boards in Missouri, and gets up only three times – twice to take a piss in the rickety bus bathroom, once to get off at a rest stop outside Richmond, Indiana, stretch her legs, and buy herself a sandwich – before the bus spits her out in Newark, from which she takes a taxi to a two-star hotel in Kearny. She pays for a single night’s stay with four crisp twenties – the service is tomorrow, and she’ll bring her bag with her and leave directly from the park. There’s no reason to be sentimental about the whole thing, she tells herself as she prepares for bed, brushes her teeth in the mirror and tries not to notice the faint scar where she’d once had a tattoo around her left eye. No reason at all. She’s only here to pay her respects to whoever was persistent enough to track her down.

          The traitorous little voice in the back of her head, the one that loves to remind her of the long summer evenings spent counting winnings and spinning dreams, of the close, comfortable safety she felt holding and being held by him, wonders if she should stay a while, should build bridges with the people who filled his life after she left it. The traitorous little voice points out she’s left nothing and no one she’d miss in Carthage, that the twenty years she’s spent trying to make herself into the picture of a respectable woman have given her nothing for her pains. The traitorous little voice, which sounds like her own from the turn of the century, when she was young and giddy and reckless, insists on wishing, despite her best efforts to convince herself she doesn’t care, that he weren’t dead.

 

***

 

          “Rome,” Emori decides, running her oversized left thumb along the thick wad of bills in her right hand and enjoying the sound they make as they ruffle against each other, like waves breaking on a shore. “I want to see the Colosseum, and Trevi Fountain, and to drink  _ good _ wine for once and eat so much pasta I explode.” She sets the cash on her lap, reaches down to pick up the bottle of Thunderbird at the foot of the lawn chair on which she sits and takes a pull from it, holding her nose as the foul-tasting stuff goes down. “They’ve got a lot of museums there,” she muses; “we could be art thieves.” 

          “More illustrious than scamming drunkards at poker fifty miles out from Vegas,” John admits. He holds up a hand, and she passes him the Thunderbird; he drinks as if it doesn’t taste like gasoline. He tilts his head back to look at her, his eyes more beautiful even than the sunset over the Nevada desert, the pinks and oranges blending into the cool blue of night, the stars, the moon. “And hey, we’ve proven I have an eye for beauty.”

          Emori snorts, but she can’t stop the warmth that creeps up her chest on butterfly wings. “But not value,” she retorts. 

          John takes her left hand in both of his, squeezes until his heat bleeds through her cool, rough skin. “And value,” he says. “I spot the diamonds in the rough.”

          “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

          She does not think of him as graceful, but his movement is fluid when he rolls onto his knees and takes her face in his hands and kisses her, his touch as present as his thoughts can be absent sometimes. He’s told her a little – a wrongful accusation, and then a rightful one – and she’s shown him her hand, but neither of them asks the other for the full story of the things that chased them here – some things, Emori knows, and knows John knows, too, are hard enough to hold in you without trying to acknowledge them.

          “Just you,” he breathes when he pulls away, his thumbs resting on her cheekbones. “There’s just you.”

          There’s a weight to the air between them that threatens to break, so Emori reaches for the wine again, and John resumes his seat on the grass against the side of the chair. She drinks, long and steadying, before speaking again. “And you? Where would you go with a million dollars?”

          “Germany,” John says. “I don’t know much about the world, but I know the Germans have a whole month devoted to beer and a word that means deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others, so I figure they’re my kind of people.”

          “Booze and sadism, huh?” Emori says. “Is that really all you think you are, John?”

          “What? You think I’m something more?” 

          “You’re handsome,” Emori offers. “And not a bad kisser.”  
  
          John grins up at her. She loves that smile, caught halfway between cockiness and youthful innocence, more than she believes she has loved anything since she was a youthful innocent herself. She slides from her chair into the grass beside him, wrapping her arms around his neck and draping her legs over his lap, and he folds her into his arms and kisses her, more than proving her point as to his skill, at least from the perspective of the girl drunk on young love and cheap wine that she is. She laughs against his lips and he presses her into the grass, scrabbling to undress her even as she rolls them over. They fuck and fall asleep that way, half-clothed in the short, prickly desert grass, Emori’s arm around John’s shoulder and her head resting on his chest. There is no doubt in her that she is happy with this life, with the little rented ranch house with the leaky roof and the dishonest income and the boy whose heart beats beneath her ear, as steady as all the days to come that they will live, as petty thieves (not a half-bad life, when you’re twenty-four and have no thoughts but love and some half-baked idea of freedom), together.  


***

          She had wanted more, he hadn’t; she had gone on the straight and narrow, while he, if the turnout at his funeral is any indication, had not. She is the only person there not bedecked in prison tattoos, and she is fairly certain she spots several of the ankle bracelets meant to keep track of parolees. Of course, as sparse and as ill-connected as his mourners may be, it is a better turnout than she will be able to expect when she dies – at least there are men dressed in black with the good graces to stay silent as the casket is lowered into the earth. She doesn’t think anyone in Carthage even knows the name she uses there. And John certainly won’t be in attendance – she’s never consciously imagined him there when she’s contemplated her own death and its aftermath, but if, in the corner of her mind’s eye, she just so happened to picture a scruffy man with a scarred throat and eyes like drowning come to kneel and shed a solitary tear at her grave, so what? It’s her right as the hypothetical deceased. But now it’s supposition contrary to fact, now John’s dead in the earth and she’s struggling not to let out a solitary tear of her own as she watches a gravedigger begin to shovel dirt into the hole.

          “How did he die?” she asks the guest nearest her, a brown-skinned man of average height with a large nose and a set mouth who looks about the age John would have been.

          He glances over at her. “Neck snapped in a bar fight,” he says, his voice dull.   
  
          Emori doesn’t want to picture hands around John’s neck, the action potential of coarse, unfriendly fingers, nails yellowed from years of making tobacco one of several drugs of choice digging into the much-abused flesh of John’s throat. She doesn’t want to imagine the sound of John’s vertebrae cracking under that hand’s grip, or the way his neck must have twisted at an inhuman angle, his body gone limp. She doesn’t want to, but she does, and hot tears creep from her eyes at the thought that someone did this to him, that no one stopped it, that she wasn’t there to stop it, and then to press her lips against the raw red imprints of meaty fingers until they purpled into love bites, the way she’d pressed them to his scars in the Nevada desert, and he his to hers. The man with the dull voice frowns at her, lays a hand awkwardly on her shoulder, and she hates herself for bursting into tears at the first proper human touch she’s had since leaving John twenty-two years before.

         “You’re the woman, aren’t you?” the man says. She looks up at him, wiping the dampness from her cheeks as if she could conceal the fact of such an obvious outburst with ten seconds and the back of her normally-formed hand, and he continues. “Emily? Emory? The one he talked about, the one who broke his heart back in the nineties.”

          He’s wrong about her name, of course, but it’s  _ her name  _ he’s trying to find, not the name of the empty, voiceless woman from Missouri who the children of the town are all certain is a witch – a witch without even a cat for companionship. She feels years fall from her face as she pulls back to meet his eyes. “He talked about me?” she asks, digging the nails of her normally-formed fingers into her normally-formed palm to keep her voice as steady as she can make it. The man nods.

          “Too much for everyone else’s taste, honestly. He was, like, in love with you.”

          “After twenty years?” Emori asks. She shakes her head. “The idiot.”

          The man hums agreement. Emori shifts on her feet. The duffle bag slung over her right shoulder on an expandable strap feels as heavy as a grown man now; she is not sure she has the strength to start the return trip to Carthage tonight. And hell, everything that ever came close to mattering to her is here, either in her bag or in the ground. She really has nothing to lose either way.

          “Do you want to get a coffee?” she asks, and the man looks at her, startled. “I think I’d like to get to know his friends,” she adds, “since it’s too late to reacquaint myself with him.”

          The man nods, extends his hand for a shake; although she doesn’t know if he was there the night John died, if he failed to save him, she takes it, because all she has left at which to grasp are straws, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t clutch them with all her might. She squeezes just a little too tightly.

          “I’m Mbege,” the man says, when she releases him from her grip, shaking his hand out to renew the circulation she’d cut off from his fingers.

          Her own name feels foreign and yet freeing on her tongue – it has been so long since she has allowed herself to think of it.

          “Emori.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments feed the hungry writer - you know what to do.
> 
> Also, a clarification: I know Oktoberfest is not "a whole month devoted to beer;" John Murphy, however, doesn't have to.


End file.
